Starmer, the sober man of law who returned power to Labour

Keir Starmer has arrived at Downing Street as if he had never really foreseen it. This sober man of law, a prosecutor turned politician, remains an enigma to the United Kingdomeven though he has managed to get Labour out of its long journey through the desert.

Sober is valid as boring, hermetic, dull and constrained. But it is also valid as moderate, pragmatic, rational and sensible. Apply it to taste.

The good thing about playing with your cards close to your chest is that there are as many Starmers in the collective imagination as there are voters in the country. And none of them scared the electorate enough to not entrust him with the keys to 10 Downing Street.

Since the Conservative Party began its dismantling in chapters in the last legislature (first with Boris Johnson’s parties, then with Liz Truss’s fiscal calamity, finally with Rishi Sunak’s political ineptitude), Starmer has been clear that only a mistake of his own would deprive him of power.

That has angered the Labour grassroots, but at the same time sent a calming message to the country: you can give me the reins, I won’t do anything strange.

In all fairness, Starmer has not budged ideologically one inch in years. Fiscal discipline, strict accounting, achievable promises and seriousness in management form the core of his message.

None of this made voters jump for joy, but it didn’t stop them from voting for him either. By now, Starmer will be well aware that the percentage of votes he has obtained (a 3. 4%) is considerably lower than the one his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, as charismatic as he is divisive, obtained in the election he lost in 2017 (40%).

The difference is that this time the conservative Theresa May got a 43% of the votes and on this occasion the conservative Sunak was left in the 24%.

If we use a footballing analogy that Starmer is so fond of, this election was closer to a Tory own goal than a spectacular last-minute Labour bicycle kick.

The football theme is not trivial: football has been a central element of the campaign (most of his rallies have been held in small stadiums) and is an intrinsic part of the Labour leader’s personality, as journalist Tom Baldwin explains in the only authorised biography of Starmer, as complete as it is benevolent.

Humble origins

Despite his obsession with privacy, the new prime minister has repeatedly recounted the details of his childhood in a working-class family struggling to make ends meet.

He was born in 1962 in Surrey, south of London, a traditionally bourgeois and conservative area, where he always felt, according to his biography, a little out of place.

The figure of his father, a craftsman with strong leftist convictions, is of capital importance when it comes to explaining the character.

He maintained a huge emotional distance from his four children, while concentrating his energies on caring for his wife, Jo, who suffered from a rare autoinflammatory disease, something Starmer has recalled bitterly on several occasions.

A model student at a grammar school (public schools for the best students), the head of the Government studied at the University of Leeds and later at Oxford, where he became captivated by the defence of human rights.

He flirted from a young age with the most radical branches of Labour, going so far as to proclaim in a job interview for a law firm that “property is theft” (although he later admitted that it was a provocation).

Despite everything, those closest to him have always detected in him an essence of ‘patriot of the people’a man of order with an attachment to his country and its traditions, far removed from the image of an elitist and cosmopolitan lawyer with which the right portrays him.

He has never given up on football matches with his friends or his season ticket at Arsenal stadium, which keep him grounded.

An indecipherable personality

Neither his biographer nor the journalists who have followed him in recent years have managed to fully decipher Starmer. To begin with, he is usually very reticent when it comes to talking about his personal life (little is known about his two children) and his convictions. The vocation and self-esteem that usually accompany politicians are not evident in him.

However, he has proven to be ruthless when he sees fit. He rose to the post of head of the Prosecutor’s Office in 2008 after having built a reputation as a human rights lawyer.

Six years later he left the Public Prosecutor’s Office to make the leap into politics as a Labour candidate and soon caught the attention of Corbyn, who brought him into his team first as spokesman for Immigration and later for Brexit.

Following the leader’s resignation following his defeat in 2019, Starmer positioned himself as a unity candidate in the primaries and was elected to rebuild the party.

Since then, he has not hesitated to purge Corbyn for his inaction against anti-Semitism and to eliminate the entire critical sector.

The result of four years of a change of direction came today. Now it is up to Starmer to navigate waters even more stormy than those of his party.

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